BUY THE BOOKS!
In this article in the Washington Post online, the disturbing news is that students are no longer buying the textbooks for their college classes because they're so expensive. At community colleges, the article says that textbook costs are 3/4 of the tuition cost. Instead, they are borrowing the textbooks from students in other sections of the same class, while their friends are IN class. Of course, many of these students have to re-take the class because they get little or nothing out of it.
The interesting news is about rental books policies, something which seems TOTALLY reasonable to me.
Here's a press release from Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) on the study he conducted on New York State textbook prices. The average there for public colleges is $103.98, which seems about right to me for English...but underpriced for a science class.
1 Comments:
The textbook companies are vile and evil. Whenever they come around hawking their wares, I am very hostile to them, and chase them out of my office.
I assign most of my reading as links online. The two books I have students reading are Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston (the NYT tax expert) [which was about $0.75 at Amazon used]. The other book was Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce which could also be had used for less than $10.
Of course, I had to work up the curriculum, the writing prompt, etc. all by my lonesome, but then this is why I thought we went into teaching—to stay engaged, not just to punch a card and teach cookie cutter classes from books that already package all the answers. We want to fight the textbook companies? Stop assigning them for classes. I don't know about you, but I can't stand to be that bored.
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